The explorative function of theory

(Brown 2007, p. 249) I propose to address this predicament through developing further the explorative function of theories.

innovations merging at the “market-authority nexus” (Strange 1988, p. 22).

In a similar sense, yet from an early feminist perspective, Enloe argues that “we risk being globally naive” (Enloe 2000, p. xiv) if we do not investigate the entirety of the international system. It would be silly leaving “untouched our presumptions about just what ‘international politics’ is.” (ibid. 2000, p. 196) Writes Enloe:

“Governments need more than secrecy and intelligence agencies; they need wives who are willing to provide their diplomatic husbands with unpaid services so those men can develop trusting relationships with other diplomatic husbands. They need not only military hardware, but a steady supply of women’s sexual services to convince their soldiers that they are manly. To operate in the international arena governments seek other governments’

recognition of their sovereignty; but they also depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain that sense of autonomous nationhood. (…) An exploration of agribusiness, prostitution, foreign-service sexism and attempts to tame outspoken nationalist women with homophobic taunts all reveal that in reality it takes much more power to construct and perpetuate international political relations than we have been led to believe.” (Enloe 2000, pp. 196-197)

Strange’s and Enloe’s outstanding investigations provide crucial lessons that are often overlooked during the debate about philosophical foundations. First, while they aspired to grasp and describe international relations in their entire scope and dimensionality, they have largely stayed aloof epistemological skirmishes. Furthermore, Enloe and Strange have employed an almost invisible theoretical toolbox and a sort of infra-language to facilitate curiosity and discovery (Enloe 2004). In this sense, methods, theoretical concepts and frameworks are not seen as an end in itself that warrant rigorous epistemological safeguards as a precondition for research. Rather, theoretical apparatuses make sense only if they foster curiosity about the things one does not know yet, and enable a non-reductionist, realistic investigation into the multiplicity of the world (Enloe 2007, Aradau and Huysmans 2013).

Such an investigation reveals, according to Enloe, that sustaining international politics is “far more complicated than most experts would have us believe.” Thus, she is not appealing to specific theories or methods, but rather to the nitty-gritty of fieldwork.

The foundational claim, which Enloe consequently advances without much ado, is the

proposition that “the international is personal” (Enloe 2000, p. 196-197). Her foundational position is not cloaked in epistemological silk. Like other feminist explorers, Enloe prioritizes hidden contexts, personal experiences and biographies, and real local or corporal situations to carve out the role of women in sustaining the

“international”. Christine Sylvester, in a similar sense, juxtaposes the abstractness of isolated male-made hypothesis testing and stylized facts with Sandra Harding’s “feminist empiricism” that foregrounds the “context of discovery”, putting the researcher onto the same plane with its subject matter (Sylvester 1994, p.33). The main concern of these dissident voices amounts to “first-order questions about the world”, as Griffiths and Callaghan note, rather than to a-priori limiting the scope of international relations (Griffiths and Callaghan 2000, p. 199).

Enloe’s feminist IR and Strange’s global political economy illustrate that minimal theoretical tools put into practice can be highly innovative with respect to shifting IR’s prior ontological demarcations. This captures precisely the where explorative realism identifies the main function of theories; its underlying problematique is peculiar: it cannot be confused with the epistemological problems of the Kantian object-subject duality (Patomäki and Wight 2000). Nor is it similar to the critical realist concerns for

“correspondence” between theory and reality (Wight 2007). The key difference is that theories here unearth ontological novelties. Quoting again from Jennifer Sterling-Folker’s introduction to IR theory helps to clarify what is at stake here:

“Another useful analogy is to think of IR theory as a set of perspectives equivalent to the alternative lenses one might use on a 35mm camera. The subject may be an elephant in grasslands, but an alternative lens will reveal different aspects and details of the elephant and its surroundings so that, as Barry Buzan says, “looking through it makes some features stand out more strongly while pushing others into the background” (…) The basic lens provides a shot of the elephant and its setting immediately to its front, back, and sides. A panoramic lens suddenly makes the elephant seem smaller in relation to its surroundings, which are now more expansive and more important to the image. A series of close-up lenses draw attention ever nearer to the elephant, enlarging it until its surroundings no longer seem relevant and details that had escaped attention before are noticeable. Tinted lenses of yellow, red, or blue highlight different shadows and features that had not seemed pertinent or particularly noteworthy with other lenses.” (Sterling-Folker 2006, p. 5)

In line with Huntington, Sterling-Folker’s metaphorical story perfectly captures one important function of theory—the usage of different lenses for zooming in and out in order to get a complete picture of the subject matter. Conceptualizing theory in terms of its potential for exploration, however, would turn this narrative on its head by asking how theories enable one to discover, in the first place, an elephant in the grasslands, or even the entire species of elephants. In a similar sense, what counts is not the resolution of a map or the set of features that has been selected. Against Huntington, theories, maps, or models have to feature the “white areas” and must lead to places without a stable “order”.

It should offer clues and hints about where we might feel insecure to the extent that we walk on instable ground. It should point to locations where the dimensions and parameters on which we usually rely might not hold. It is the edges of a map, where the clarity of representation is muddled, that attract our attention.

Putting such a demand to maps seems odd only if we expect maps to deliver exact representations and forget the contingency of map making. If the landscape is unstable, a map that employs the logic of stability—focused on the known—will guide us into perplexing and paradoxical situations. Instead, what our map should do is to support navigating the insecure categories, unclear processes, and unknown agencies. Our travel itinerary could take us to broken expressways between two metropolises, or across nano-particles in the human body or to mountain tribes that lack categories of statehood.

Differently, we could plan visiting assembly lines or air force drone facilities where humans converge with machines and are stretched over virtual spaces; or, perhaps, satellite equipped nomads, online-shamans, and stateless migrants. As such, the content of a specific map (and some auxiliary travel guides) were to offer us different axes and dimensions of controversial subject matters.

Explorative realism, in other words, understands theories as working tools that help to uncover real-world multiplicities and complexity under conditions of analytical uncertainty. That one should never mistake the map for the landscape, here, takes on a new meaning. Theory does not refer to a pre-given “order” and, therefore, does not foreclose what we might encounter. In turn, reading theories in accordance with explorative realism explains the marvelous and surprising experience if one turns to Strange’s and Enloe’s texts.

We are now familiar with the explorative function of theories. What needs to be done is to systematize this function. Table 3.1 shows two related subdivisions: The first is named “foundational collectors”. Their role is expanding (or restricting) the uncertainties that we are able to “perceive” at the ontological level. Foundational collectors, thus, enable us on the one hand to disclose uncharted empirical landscapes and on the other hand to multiply objects, sets of objects, and sets of sets of objects. In practice, they can be freely applied to texts, archives, or used in the field. The second column displays

“conceptual models”, which enable researchers to connect different objects, to circumscribe processes, and to think about puzzles using various concepts. This conceptual language does not aim, ultimately, to contribute to or being assessed by an isolated “Theory”. Rather, as suggested, the two types of theoretical tools—employed separately or in combined fashion—are at the disposal of an explorative IR. Accordingly, theories do not resemble “as if” operations typical for instrumentalist frameworks such as Waltz’ Theory of International Politics (Monteiro and Ruby 2009a, p. 27). Neither are they sets of assumptions about causality or causal explanations of empirical variations (cf. Kurki 2006). Theories understood in this sense neither buttress truth claims, nor critically inquire historical contingencies. Their only purpose is enabling scientific exploration in practice. In short, theory, instead of delivering answers to epistemology, poses questions to empirics.

foundational collectors conceptual models function opens up new landscapes

multiplying objects and processes

sorts out relevant processes and interconnections

parameterization

nature

statement definition slogan motto

data-driven middle-range proposition

metaphor map network web flashlight lens chart paradigm

framework concept hypothesis model toy-model working-model

example

'international system' 'world system'

'the international is personal' 'global-local'

'coproduction of order'

'state' 'sovereignty' 'markets' 'power' 'associations' 'stabilization' practical

purpose a tool for discovering and description a tool for selecting of sets of cases and formatting and comparing puzzles

     ...  TABLE  6.1  THEORETICAL  TOOLS  FOR  AN  EXPLORATIVE  REALISM  ©AUTHOR  

Given that the politics of technological innovations still represent an under-researched subject matter in IR, foundational collectors will play a crucial role for my purpose.¹¹¹ Moreover, foundational collectors play an instrumental role concerning the multi-perspectivity of IR. Their innovational capacity could become a decisive factor for the progress of the entire discipline. To realize their potential, foundational collectors must be understood as, to quote Jackson, “working assumptions, or wagers, and evaluated for their analytical productivity rather than in terms of their ultimate philosophical validity”

(Jackson 2009, p. 463). But as a mental precondition, we have to revitalize the creative dimension of IR. “At the core of the theorizing process is a creative imagination”, reminds James Rosenau students of international politics, and maintains: “to think theoretically one must allow one's mind to run freely, to be playful, to toy around with what might seem absurd, to posit seemingly unrealistic circumstance and speculate what would follow if they were ever to come pass.” (Rosenau 1980, p. 35)

Rosenau’s plea applies to the ontological level in equal terms. The explorative mind-set is imperative for non-normal conditions. While “the commitments that govern normal science” restrict the entities contained in the world according to Kuhn (1970, p.

7), we are by now released from these chains. Why not open our descriptions for additional objects, processes, beasts, relations, modes, and existences--all of which were dwelling beyond the great wall of restrictive onto-politics. The proliferation of foundational collectors could lead to an age of ontological revolutions. It would therefore be mistaken to perceive the contemporary foundational debates as boring burden or as                                                                                                                

111 As the second chapter has shown, technological innovations warrant a special attention at the ontological level, as their fluid character is evading the typical conceptual boundaries that social science draws between the “social” and the “technical” domain (De Laet and Mol 2000, Mol and Law 1994).

dry exercises. Instead, multiplying perspectives, diversifying assumptions, and differentiating methodologies gives reason for remaining faithful to a “divided discipline”. The momentum of theoretical plurality should be embraced as an innovative move of discovering and exploring new dimensions, scopes, and complexities of existence as relevant for IR. The fruits of these discoveries, of course, demand the hard work of processing. It is not without efforts to incorporate them into the body of accepted puzzles and theories. World-views have to be corrected; theoretical frameworks need be adopted and so on. Stretching the traditional boundaries of IR also requires enormous efforts of intellectual persuasion, bridging conversations, and inter-paradigm

“translations” (Busser and Wegner 2012, cf. Kuhn 1970, p. 202ff.).

To some extent this is already occurring. The ramifications of opening up Pandora’s box are exemplary, as illustrated by the field of security studies. Steven Walt’s (1991) attempt to keep the flood gate closed notwithstanding, the spread of security concepts, concerns, and actors, has almost violently forced “security studies” to accommodate to broadening, deepening, and multiplying of the “stuff” of security (Lipschutz 1995, Smith 1999, Fierke 2007, Booth 2007b, Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008, Buzan and Hansen 2009, Aradau 2010). Due to this sustained momentum, it is not by coincidence that especially the field of “critical security studies” is most furiously pushing the envelope of IR theories.

Explorative realism extends and supports this kind of ontological widening in specific ways. It agrees with pragmatic thinking that “gladiator style” research has entirely lost its appeal (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009, Sil and Katzenstein 2010). The increasing plurality of theoretical perspectives, which has already been a feature of IR during the interwar period, has lessened the epistemological dominance of positivist approaches embodied in Neorealism and Neoinstitutionalism to a certain degree. As Cochran notes, a historical chance, related to methodological pluralism, exists for the

“broadening of our understanding of what international relations is, opening the range of possible ontological claims” (Cochran 2009, p. 147). The “blossoming of a hundred flowers” is not just the analytically most productive way forward as pragmatism suggests.

Learning, among others, from Vandana Shiva and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, we have to value the diversification of philosophical foundations also for ethical reasons.

Ontological homogeneity in IR produces narrow-minded research agendas, policy advice, and sometimes policies. The conditions of possibility for monocultures, ultimately, depend upon willful blindness against alternative ontologies (Shiva 1994, de Santos Sousa 2004, 2005). As such, monoculture puts the community of researchers into a fairly troubled position (Smith 2004).

From the view of philosophy of science, however, critical research does not necessarily require embarking on the postcolonial, the anti-western, the subaltern realist, or the anti-neoliberal camp. It would suffice shifting the epistemology-focused debates to ontological concerns by means, for instance, of a playful and agnostic employment of foundational collectors. Capturing the gist of post-foundational times from a Kuhnian perspective, then, means taking theory seriously as a device for discovering and exploring new empirical landscapes. As such, the anti-positivist tenet at the core of many feminist, postcolonial, and post-structural studies has from the very beginning contained an emphasis on redirecting our attention away from epistemological battles. Quite a few scholars, arguably at the margins of IR, entertain the ambition to push ontological frontiers outwards. In Chapter 5 I lay out my own approach to ontological expansions suited for studying technological innovations—inspired by Cox’s, Strange’s and Enloe’s monumental inroads und drawing on other extra-disciplinary sources. Prior to that, the next section will briefly discuss the epistemological position that accommodates explorative realism.

6.3 The practice of knowing: from matters of concern to matters of fact